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Girls Recap: We discuss the quirk (and irk)-filled pilot of HBO’s most buzzed-about show

Welcome to our weekly recap of Girls, the new show from HBO that media are touting as Sex and the City for Millennials. It’s likely journalists just like to compare things that share numbers, like New Kids on the Block and the Backstreet Boys had five guys singing to teenage girls, because while Sex and the City and Girls both take a concerted look at the lives of four women living in New York City, that is where the similarities awkwardly pause. Girls is mostly concerned with Hannah, who is 24, works in publishing and lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn like a current-day Emily Gould. Hannah lives with her gallerist bestie Marnie. There’s also their friend Jessa, who has just arrived back in the city from some kind of spiritual quest/pearl shucking/bazaar shopping expedition and is living with her earnest, velour-tracksuit-wearing cousin Shoshanna.

Like any girl in her early twenties, post-college or no, these ladies have problems of the guy/work/family/friend variety, so let’s see how they go about solving them, or more likely, making them worse. Each week we’ll take a look at the two main problems affecting the Girls and how they go about trying to find a solution. Ten years older than the Girls, and having lived through her fair share of humiliations, your recapper will also weigh in on whether these problems are just rest stops on the road to better character or psyche damaging pile-ups that will follow them the rest of their days.